Film Friday: Manakamana, Borgman, Gerontophilia and more

Manakamana (Stephanie Spray, Pacho Velez) is the latest project from Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Laboratory, which produced last year's stunning experimental documentary Leviathan. Filmmakers Spray and Velez put a static camera inside a cable car travelling high over Nepal's Trisuli Valley, recording passengers passing the time on the 10-minute trip between the Manakamana temple and the village below. Eleven sequences are edited into a single seamless experience, its narrative rhythms created by the rocking of the landscape in the background. If you're prone to carsickness, this might not be for you. But as a meditation on the way human beings fill the silence around them - or choose not to - it's an amazing accomplishment. Subtitled. 118 min. NNNN (NW)

Borgman (Alex van Warmerdam) stars Hadewych Minis as the wife of an upwardly mobile, detestable, self-important bigot (Jeroen Perceval). She invites the enigmatic title character - whose Manson-like charisma conceals satanic powers - into her perfect home only to become an unwitting participant in its destruction. Van Warmerdam uses the elusive Borgman (creepily embodied by the nimble Jan Bijvoet) as the catalyst in his allegorical indictment of the Dutch ruling class. Deftly moving from cutting-edge black humour to blatant evil, this boisterous satire is marred only by a heavy-handed endgame. Subtitled. 113 min. NNN (PE)

Gerontophilia (Bruce LaBruce) follows Lake (Pier-Gabriel Lajoie), a young man who's hung a poster of Gandhi on his bedroom wall to inspire idealism but also a hard-on. This may not be so shocking for those familiar with Canadian filmmaker LaBruce. The queer provocateur tackles a new taboo in this coming-of-ager that revolves around Lake's thing for seniors. If his romance with 81-year-old Mr. Peabody (Walter Borden) initially seems like an attempt to needle conservatives, LaBruce surprises with a warmth and tenderness - and quite a bit of humour - that carries the central relationship beyond fetishism. 82 min. NNN (RS)

It's only Make Believe (Arild Østin Ommundsen) is a gorgeously photographed, dramatically thin redemption tale from Norway that fuses fable and thriller tropes. It's the fifth feature from multi-hyphenate Ommundsen, yet feels more like a whiz kid's calling card than a mature work. After serving time for killing a thug, all Jenny (Silje Salomonsen) wants is to be with her young daughter. But Jenny's financially strapped, her boyfriend's catatonic, and nasty criminal-types from Jenny's misspent youth start turning up and demanding favours. But fret not. A fairy tale happy ending awaits - which is, of course, exactly what the title promises. Calling this fanciful eye candy "make-believe" doesn't make it any more satisfying, but neither does it diminish the modest visual pleasures that Ommundsen deftly conjures. Subtitled. 91 min. NNN (José Teodoro)

Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger (Joe Berlinger) finds Paradise Lost co-director Berlinger turning his lens on another American criminal case that certainly feels like a miscarriage of justice: the legacy of Whitey Bulger, a Boston Mob boss alleged to have murdered at least 19 people in his heyday, and who spent 16 years as one of the FBI's most wanted fugitives. When Bulger was finally brought to trial in 2013, the FBI claimed he was one of their best informants - an assertion Bulger vehemently denies. Decades of criminal activity (on both sides of the law) means Berlinger has to process an overwhelming volume of information before we can even begin to consider all the possibilities, so a great deal of the film is spent going over court transcripts and FBI paperwork. But when the survivors of Bulger's victims tell their stories - or the man himself is heard over his lawyer's telephone - this is a chilling, immediate true-crime story. 120 min. NNN (NW)

Words and Pictures (Fred Schepisi) is an insufferable movie about insufferable people having a barely sufferable argument: are words or pictures the most powerful communication tool humans have evolved? The debate is pointless because art is subjective, but neither Clive Owen's alcoholic poet nor Juliette Binoche's disabled painter will budge; after all, characters in romantic comedies need stupid obstacles before they can fall in love. Gerald Di Pego writes both as obnoxious variations on Hugh Laurie's crotchety, cutting Dr. House, and director Schepisi reminds us once again that he's incapable of making a bad script work. For their part, Owen and Binoche dive into their repugnant characters with everything they've got, apparently confident no one will ever see the finished product. Well, there's always hope. 115 min. N (NW)